Reference no: EM133894423 , Length: word count:2000

Overview

In this collaborative project, you will work to create a project management plan to help an organisation solve its problems and meet its business requirements. You will be able to ascertain the business problems and requirements from the scenario provided in this document, and your task is to use PMP guidelines to overcome those problems and meet those requirements. Your plan will detail the cost, risk, quality, stakeholders, change management, configuration management, contracts management, and maintenance management related to the project. You are to employ basic problem-solving steps to break down the problem, identify the tasks that must be completed to address the problem and assign each task to a team member. Get online assignment help to achieve academic success!

The project is organised in three parts:

Part A is a group component where you work with a team to create a plan for the HWE Training Department that addresses the goals you have been tasked with to implement a new skills inventory and training management and planning system that will help enhance the corporate culture. You will be assessed on the final report that the group produces.

Part B is an individual project where you reflect on how well your team performed against the PMP guidelines. You will be assessed individually on the journal you produce.

Part C is where you individually fill in a peer evaluation form on the completion of the project to indicate how well your peers performed during the group activity (Part A).

Learning Outcome 1: Apply project management planning, management and control techniques to solve business problems

Learning Outcome 2: Apply critical thinking and business skills to analyse an IT related project

Learning Outcome 3: Create a project plan that meets organisational requirements

Part A: System Plan

Scenario

Home World Enterprises (HWE) is a large homeware company. Established more than twenty years ago, HWE has a reputation throughout the Asia-Pacific region of providing sound and trendy products at reasonable prices. HWE provides a wide range of furniture, lighting, kitchen renovation services and essentially everything for the home. Recently, competition has been growing and eroding HWE's market. The main competition now comes from a Swedish multi-national company that has a similar culture and modus operandi.

This reduction in market dominance has resulted in the realisation that the company must enhance its performance or continue to lose market share. HWE wants to both enhance performance in existing business operations and open up new market opportunities globally.

The Corporate Plan

The HWE board employed a firm of consultants to undertake an extensive analysis of the environment and the organisation as a whole. The findings and recommendations from this have led to a significant change in corporate direction.

Goals

The key corporate goals established to bring about the necessary corporate change include:

To aggressively market a new image of excellence in product and customer service at affordable prices.

To present a picture (and achieve it) of a fun outing when shopping at HWE. To accomplish this HWE need to provide a complete service including restaurant, coffee shop, teenage and child entertainment facilities and more.

To ensure all staff are fully trained and capable in all areas of company operation. Staff need to be product experts, internal decoration consultants, fully capable of using corporate administration and support systems, first class customer service operatives and more.

To ensure a corporate culture of service and excellence is fostered.

Strategies

Some of the strategies put in place to achieve these goals relevant to our current objectives are as follows:

The company recognises the investment its people require to achieve this new image. Currently, the training team is under resourced and wholly unprepared for this new challenge.

The first steps taken by the company have been to elevate the status of the training function to the level of a department and to employ a high-level training professional to head it.

The Training Department

In line with the increased importance of staff development, the General Manager of Human Resources has elevated training to the status of a Department. To consolidate the significance of this, Rod Stone was recently appointed as director of the Training Department.

Rod was given a clear mandate to achieve a transformation of the corporate culture through training and development. He was directed to get the department fully functional, along with the new guidelines, within six months.

The team, only twenty or so full-time members (plus contractors as required), are spread thinly with no more than two members in each capital city. Several people in the unit (about one in each region) are fairly new and will take time to be fully functional. Apart from the new arrivals, the teams in each region have been together for a number of years and are working well.

One aspect that will help ensure the overall Corporate and specifically Training Department goals are achieved involves the development and implementation of a training system.

Tasking the Project Team

Mission

You are to meet the agreed systems requirements of the Training Department. In addition, the products of this project are to be of an acceptable quality standard as determined by the Training Department, our client, and myself as your manager. This project is to be completed within the agreed time and budgetary constraints. A copy of the project request form is attached.

Task

The project team is to determine what the system requirements of HWE's Training Department are and to design a system that meets these needs. The approach is to result in the presentation of a proposal for the system and its implementation. The following is an overview of what we believe the fundamental needs are most likely to be.

The system requirement is, in essence, a skills inventory and training management and planning system. The expected system involves managing the company's staff skills levels. The first stage of this is skills associated with operating software owned by HWE. This was chosen as there is a manual Training Needs Analysis (TNA) system that can form the nucleus of a system for further development and computerisation.

System concepts

All internal clients (staff) and the software they own are used to build and conduct Training Needs Analysis (TNA) surveys, record the data collected and allow the training department to use this to plan and manage gap filling training for the company's people. HWE has asked Whitecliffe Technology to put forward a proposal to provide a system that meets their needs. The training department will need to determine what products each of our customers own and marry this with an inventory of all the possible competencies that could be needed by an operator to successfully work with these products. This process would result in a comprehensive list of all competencies that could ever be required.

We would then use this information to build a "Training Needs Analysis" questionnaire. For each competency, we need to ask two questions. One, what level of skill do you need to have and, two, what level of skill do you currently have?

Rod and I currently envisage a system to conduct "Training Needs Analysis" survey with the selected staff. This is to determine both the currently possessed skill levels of the people involved and the skill levels they will require to operate the system, as their company wants them to. These two sets of information are then to be compared to determine and identify gaps that may require training or development in order for them to meet the performance goals of their company.

We would then feed this data into a database for analysis and to generate several reports and enquires. The most obvious needs to be satisfied will be the development of both group and individual training plans. Reporting requirements of the system need to be worked out with the client.

We think there will be a need to maintain this information, in HWE, and to keep it up to date with competencies gained from training and so forth. I feel sure that we will discover additional requirements as we conduct our investigation.

There will clearly be the need to expand the scope of this system very early on to cover the whole range of skill needed to achieve a corporate culture shift mentioned earlier. The additional areas will eventually need to cover product knowledge training, customer service skills, selling and other general communication skills among many others.

Requirements

Your plan must include the following sections:

Problem definition
Need analysis
Proposed solution
Scope Management
Time Management
Cost Management
Quality Management
Human Resource Management
Communications Management
Project Risk Management
Procurement Management
Stakeholder Management